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Cardinal Sauce
Prepare one pint of melted butter or butter sauce, and color it with pounded lobster coral; when that cannot be procured, pound together the red part of a lobster and some shrimps. Pass them through a fine hair-sieve, and season with salt, cayenne pepper, and the strained juice of a lemon. Stir the fish mixture into the sauce while boiling, and when well mixed it will be ready for serving.
A classic lobster-red sauce for poached fish, built on the Victorian "butter sauce" rather than on plain melted butter. Two phrases in the original will mislead a modern cook if taken literally.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American kitchens "melted butter" meant a thickened butter sauce: roughly 2 tbsp flour cooked in 2 tbsp butter, whisked with about 2 cups of water, milk or fish stock, then finished with more butter. A pint of genuinely melted butter would break the moment the fish paste went in.
- Lobster coralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, near-black and gelatinous when raw and bright scarlet only after cooking. It must be cooked (in the shell, or dried in a low oven) before it will color anything. Fishmongers rarely sell it separately; buying whole cooked hen lobsters is the practical route.
- The shrimp substitute"The red part of a lobster" most likely means the cooked shell and any coral rather than the tail meat. Shells and small cooked shrimp pounded to a paste and passed through a sieve give something close to what a modern kitchen calls lobster butter, though the original does not direct you to pound the paste with butter.
- Hair sieveA sieve woven from horsehair, used in period kitchens alongside the cloth tamis. A fine nylon or metal chinois does the same job; push the paste through with a ladle, since shell fragments in the finished sauce are unpleasant and can be sharp.
- "While boiling"Add the fish mixture off a hard boil. A flour-bound butter sauce holds a bare simmer, but once shellfish butter is stirred in, a rolling boil will separate it and dull the red. Warm it through and serve at once.
- Seasoning orderThe original seasons the pounded fish mixture with salt, cayenne and lemon before it is stirred into the sauce. If you prefer, hold the lemon juice back to the end and off the heat, since acid can slacken a flour-thickened sauce somewhat. Taste after the sauce has stood a moment rather than before.
- Yield and useA pint serves eight to ten as a sauce for poached turbot, sole, salmon or lobster itself. It does not reheat well twice; make it as the fish comes out of the poaching liquid.
The name is generally traced to the French convention of naming red sauces for the scarlet of a cardinal's robes, and sauce cardinal was already fixed in the classical repertoire by the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his 1896 Cook Book — Escoffier's later codification gives it as a fish béchamel finished with lobster butter and, optionally, truffle. Oscar's version is the plainer Anglo-American reading of the same idea, resting on the "melted butter" that served English kitchens as an all-purpose sauce base for a long stretch of their history. Its presence in the Waldorf's kitchen notes reflects how much of a grand American hotel's fish cookery was straightforwardly French, and how thoroughly lobster shell and coral were treated as ingredients rather than waste.